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governance. We don’t come down heavy with rules. Everyone has their say.”
    “Not when it comes to health and safety.”
    “That nurse needs to chill,” someone said as I walked away.
    “Yeah,” her friend agreed. “She should take anger management.”
    Meanwhile, everyone else seemed to be having a grand old time. My own kids loved camp. Phillip was feeling a lot better after his outburst in the infirmary and our walk and talk and there were no more Micaela meltdowns. In fact, as I strolled around camp, all I ever heard were the sounds of laughter, of gleeful kids at play. I was the only miserable one. Even on rainy days, when they stayed in their cabins and had a bunk day indoors, they entertained themselves by singing funny cheers, performing silly skits, and playing board games and rock, paper, scissors, for hours. It was nice to see how content they could be, whatever the weather, managing quite well without parental intervention, technology, or toys. Of course, there were many days when they got into lots of mischief, plotting and carrying out pranks such as panty raids, cabin-hopping (when they invaded another cabin or sometimes even switched over all the furniture and camper belongings), and toilet seat-greasing. One afternoon, a posse of boys burst into the infirmary, begging to borrow the stretchers and bandages so they could dress up like accident victims. They took pictures of each other to send to their parents.
    But I didn’t give up trying to bring them in line with what was important to me: health and safety. After they returned from a five-kilometre hike into town to buy (and, of course, share) candy, they were flushed and happy, but their arms and faces were badly sunburned and their feet were sore and blistered. Again, my lecture to the counsellors fell on deaf ears.
    I noticed that the organic vegetable patch, which they called “The Farm,” wasn’t thriving; in fact, it was completely overgrown with weeds. During my phone interview with Mike, he had said that the garden would be used to feed the camp and the surplus would be shared with the local food bank. I doubted itwould yield enough vegetables for one meal. And that wasn’t the only thing being neglected. Chores around camp were done sloppily or not at all.
    It wasn’t because they were too busy. After the long, intense lectures the kids endured each morning on Socialism or Political Activism 101, they had lots of free fun time on their hands. Though the camp didn’t own much in the way of equipment – the sports department consisted of one soccer ball and one basketball – they played a lot of the “old-school” games, as they called them, like capture the flag and hide and go seek. They also had interest groups, like folk dancing (dances of oppressed nations, only), extreme Frisbee, a rock ’n’ roll club, stress-busters, a yo-yo workshop, dream interpretation classes, and the very popular Hippie Club. I wondered what they did in
that
club – smoke weed, drop acid, have sit-ins, and let the sunshine in?
    “What goes on in that one?” I asked Gidget, who organized the interest groups.
    “Hackey-sack, cornrow braiding, and macramé-flower pot holders.”
    “What about the Fear Factor Cookout?” I asked.
    “Well, today they cooked up a batch of fake snot.”
    “What’s the recipe?” I asked, half kidding.
    “Gelatin, green and yellow food colouring, corn starch.”
    There was even a handstand class. “Not enough propulsion and you can’t get your legs up. Too forceful and you’ll flip right over,” the instructor cautioned the kids.
    I asked Mike about the daily routine. “It’s a creative schedule,” he explained. “We try not to impose a lot of rules. We believe kids have a right to make their own decisions about how to spend their time. We don’t want to stress them out. If they want to do nothing, that’s okay, too. They need downtime.”
    “We need more safety practices,” I said. “There have been too